Fawzia Khan's "The Other" on permanent display at UROC

A gift to UROC,  Minnesota Artist Fawzia Khan's interactive installation is made up of five freestanding sculptures of bronze, wood, and mirrors that prompt the viewer to see themselves as "the other." Peering into each sculpture, the viewer sees their own eyes in the cast bronze face of another, metaphorically “putting on their skin.” Each face lacks racially distinct coloration and is reduced to shapes, lines, and texture.

Writes Khan: "It has been said that the eyes are the windows to the soul. In response to negative portrayals of people unlike ourselves, I created these series of 'portraits.' There have always been groups of people identified as 'the other.' This is a small attempt to acknowledge our common humanity."

Khan is a former obstetrician-gynecologist who has embraced art as a second career. A Pakistani-American born into a Muslim family in Nigeria, she emigrated to the U.S. at age 12 and became a citizen at 18. She left medicine after three years in practice to raise a family. Khan went back to school in 1999 and graduated from the University of Minnesota with a Bachelors Degree in Fine Arts, with an emphasis in sculpture, in 2005.